When journalists begin asking the right questions

# Did Neil Armstrongreally land on the moon in 1969, or was it all staged on the deserts of Nevada?

# Did Elvis Presleyreally die in 1976, or is he still around ducking the cameras and living a life of anonymity?

Conspiracy theories of events that took place in the pre-satellite television era have an existence all their own, but nothing come close to the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Pictures of planes flying into the towers of the World Trade Centre may have been telecast around the world, but six years later, the conspiracy theories still abound.

Not over whether Jews were forewarned not to report for work that morning but over other, more troubling questions: how it happened and who did it, who knew how much before it happened and who benefitted from it all.

Was Osama bin Laden behind the attack? Were the planes powerful enough to bring down buildings designed to withstand airplanes? Were bombs used to trigger off the collapse of the World Trade Center towers? Did the Bush administration know of the impending attack? How did the WTC ownership change hands just days before the buildings came down? Who were the mysterious investors who had presciently “put” options on the airline companies before 9/11? Who had moved the gold worth nearly a billion dollars from the vaults underneath the buildings?

Al Jazeera English, the Qatar-based Arabic news channel’s English version, looked at some of the theories recently.

Not to give the conspiracy theories some more oxygen but to see how good journalism can punch holes in the official and media versions of what we saw (or of we thought we saw) with our own eyes on the morning of 9 September 2001. And demand the answers “We, the People” are entitled to receive.

Written and directed by Dylan Avery, and produced by Korey Rowe, the powerful documentary concludes, among other things, that the Pentagon was not the target of a plane but a missile; that the “heroism” on board Flight 93 was staged; and that the WTC towers were brought down by carefully planned, controlled demolitions.

“It was a psychological attack on the American people and it was pulled off with military precision.

“It’s time for Americans to accept 9/11 for what it was: a lie which killed thousands of people only in turn killing hundreds of thousands more, to make billions upon trillions of dollars.”